Many Pies

Many Pies

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Sites with Bible text in many languages

Here are some I've come across:

worldscriptures.org from United Bible Societies and the American Bible Society Library has publication details and some pictures of text.

The Unbound Bible has downloads of texts in a number of languages in Unicode.

The Wikipedia article on Bible Translations doesn't look complete, but has a good list at the bottom of other places to go.

tags: Bible

Monday, September 25, 2006

Statistics in the wild

I was circulating some internal statistics on vacancies we had and before I know it they appear on our website.

If you're wondering why not many vacancies appear on the listing when so many are mentioned in the new article, its because the listings only have jobs with adverts written for them. Yes, we could do with more people to write adverts...

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Friday, September 22, 2006

How your users view a PC

This article is inspired by the Creating Passionate Users blog which I recommend if you support or develop software for people.

How you view your PC


How your users view a PC


To you its a fine collection of useful things to accomplish what you want. You have your favourite text editor, a couple of image editors, your IM tools, Skype, your browser, your useful browser plugins and so on.

You musn't forget what your users think of it though. They want to get their work done, but they have to use a PC to do it, and they don't like it. They haven't a clue what its really doing, they don't know why you have to single click in some places and double click in others, they don't really understand the difference between the pictures at the bottom left without writing and those at the bottom in the centre with writing (and those at the bottom on the right without writing too, oh and those in the middle with writing). You probably knew that though, but how can you help?

One good way would be to try a drive a steam train.
It looks a bit like the picture above of how your users view a PC, but try to imagine you had to drive a train with 5 minutes instruction, using all the levers and dials on a train. You would be scared that you might blow something up, after all there's a lot of pressure in that tank. It is scary. That's how the users feel. If they click the wrong button it's going to lose their work, or they are going to break something and then IT will be cross with them. So have patience, go easy on them - they're scared.

Photo credits:
http://flickr.com/photos/oxborrow/
http://flickr.com/photos/geishaboy500/
http://flickr.com/photos/bstrong


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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Cliff Richard's Favourite Verse

Philippians 4:13
I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

According to our Words for Life magazine.

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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Internationalisation and localisation

My recent need to research Unicode has sent me to investigate Internationalisation and localisation. Today I came across wordforge.org which aims to help with Internationalisation and localisation so that minority languages aren't "digitally endangered" as they put it.

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Favourite verse survey has its own URL

The survey I posted about two days ago now has its own URL. So what's your favourite bible verse?

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Monday, September 18, 2006

What's your favourite Bible verse

We've just put up a new survey on our website to find out people's favourite Bible verse. It uses SurveyPro from Apian, which lets you create, publish (to a server supporting Perl or ASP) and then analyse your survey. It does quite a lot. Feel free to tell us your favourite verse!

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Friday, September 15, 2006

Online giving

Our online giving has now gone live. We're using a company called toucan.biz to do the clever stuff.

At some point I've got to wait until the money arrives and then reconcile. Should be fun!

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Thursday, September 07, 2006

Getting round lack of font support on browsers

Whilst working on a Unicode-related project someone told me about sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). It's a way of getting custom fonts displayed on web pages which degrades gracefully if a Flash viewer isn't available. However it's not really for body text, so we won't be using it. It looks really useful in other circumstances though.

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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

So you're having trouble with a Unicode document?

You open a Unicode document and all you get is:

Here is a simple and beautiful (due to the site I link to, not to my prose) solution:

  • In Word 2003 (sorry, I don't know if it works in other versions), put the cursor after one of the characters and press Alt-X.
  • You should then get a four digit number, like 12E8.
  • Go to decodeunicode.org and run your mouse over the line of colons near the top of the page.
  • What you're looking for it to say a range of numbers after the "U+" that includes the four digit code you found above. Then you may get a link to a font you can download to display that text.


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People group information

Whilst researching some resources for the text of the Bible in many languages I came across the Joshua Project website. This is a very impressive compilation of information, towards the aim of documenting unreached groups.

One good thing is the way they show the breakdown of information by peoples, geography, language and religion, for example on this page for the Fulani.

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